


the stars are not wanted now

by serendipityful (staircase_wit)



Category: Jane the Virgin (TV)
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-09
Updated: 2017-02-15
Packaged: 2018-09-23 02:12:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9636299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/staircase_wit/pseuds/serendipityful
Summary: It wasn't supposed to happen this way. She read all the books, watched all the telenovelas, knew every romance trope and twist. They were supposed to have the rest of their lives together, a future, a happy ending. How could she even possibly go from here?"The stars are not wanted now: put out every one/Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood/For nothing now can ever come to any good." - W.H AudenAn exploration of Jane's grief post-Chapter 54. Angst abound. Multi-chapter to be continued.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So I wrote this because I don't have a lot of faith in the show to properly address Jane's grief. I wanted to do an in-depth exploration of it based on my vision of the show and what I think it represents in terms of the genre of romance. This chapter is just a short intro and I plan to expand it soon enough, but I just wanted to get this out there first.

Jane bought the purse the day after she received her first paycheck the summer after sophomore year of high school. Working at Flo’s Ice Cream Bar wasn’t exactly her dream job, but the July heat meant lines of sweaty customers willing to fork out cash to cool their parched tongues. In her journal, she outlined her budget to the cent. She was working thirty-six hours a week at minimum wage. 90% of her salary would go to the college fund leaving the remaining thirty-or-so dollars for her own use. This meant tithe, meant hangouts with Lina, meant a secondhand paperback (or three).

She found the purse at a thrift shop: a gorgeous teal leather pouch patterned with an intricate stitchery of mermaids and ocean waves. The zip was rough with use, but she had swiped it for a price that would have made even the most expert coupon cutter drop dead in envy. After exiting the shop, she slung it around her shoulders with glee skipping all the way home. It was the first thing that had ever been truly hers. Yes, there were her stories, the love poems she never sent, the embarrassing _Harry Potter_ fanfiction. But those were just words. This was cloth and thread, made by hand, something physical. _Real_. And she had earned every penny.

Ten years later, the purse was a little dirtier, a little more worn. But it still did the job and for that, it merited an enviable spot on the top drawer of her wardrobe, right next to the bras and undies.

Six days after, it took her forty minutes to get up and only because Mateo needed a diaper change. She was supposed to have plans for that day: a meeting with her advisor, a mommy group session, dinner back home. A week ago, she had typed them into her calendar, fingers tingling with the all too familiar satisfaction of a well-ordered life. There were certain things you couldn’t schedule.

“There we go, Mr. Sweetface,” she managed to croak out and she scooped up her newly-diapered baby boy. Her arms fastened her son, her precious beautiful son, tighter to her chest. She knew it was irrational, but the thought couldn’t help but paralyze her: Maybe if she held him close enough, she wouldn’t lose him.

Mateo’s soft, chubby hands pawed over her face, forcing an empty laugh from her scratchy throat. “Mommy’s not supposed to be the one crying now.”

She rubbed away the tears, only to for more to leak out the second she stops. It was useless. Everything. Jane walked over to her still-open closet. His shirt was still hanging there. A neatly pressed light blue linen smelling faintly of their lemony detergent. Her fingers thumbed over the hanger and she buried her face into the fabric, half expecting to run up against flesh and bones, but only finding air tucked between two strips of cloth. Every morning for the last six days, she has stained this one shirt with her snot and her tears and her screams. It needed a wash. Laundry was supposed to be every Tuesday and Thursday evenings. It was Friday. She exhaled and stepped back. It could hang there for all she cared.

“Your goal today, Jane,” she whispered to herself, in between giving Mateo limp bounces, “is to finally put your bra on. You owe that to yourself, Jane. You owe it—”

For the first time, she was glad that no one in her family could keep her company and stay over the night before. No soul in the world should have listened to the wail, least of all her son.

It took a brief second of composure for her to yank out her drawer, clench one of her bras in her fist, and mentally regulate her breathing. Mateo began to whimper.

Her fingers run over the purse. Her favorite purse. The one she took to dates and adventures around Miami. The purse that held her tampons, his car keys. The purse that came out of five days of dribbling chocolate sauce over scoops of strawberry ice cream.

It didn’t feel like hers. Nothing in this house felt like hers anymore. Not the kitchen table meant for four. Not the living room sofa of movie nights and makeout sessions. Not the weathered paperbacks on her bookshelf. And certainly not the bed— one side bearing the residue of five nights worth of snot, one side neatly made for someone never going to come home.

Jane slammed the drawer shut, hugged her son closer, and went back to bed.


	2. Chapter 2

Her mother and grandmother came by every day with grilled cheese and empty consolations. Jane couldn’t remember the last time she cried this much. Eight months ago, at the hospital, after the gunshot wound— those frantic thirty-six hours of half-finished prayers? Ten years ago, bundled under her covers and deaf to Xo’s vain attempts at comfort, her first breakup stemming from the purity pledge? Twenty-two years ago, her first day at preschool? The first day had been rough. One of the boys kept pulling on her pigtails and another girl wouldn’t let her sit next to her at reading circle. Abuela had come to pick her up while Xo was at an audition. Abuela, this tiny, frail woman, carrying a screaming toddler, kicking at all the airy beasts out there, all the way back home.

Now, the two older women held her and if not for their gentle strength, Jane was sure she would have fallen apart.

“Take it away from me, please,” she whimpered. However, her hands, acting against her will, only clutched the black planner tighter. It took some firm yanking from Xo for the notebook to come tumbling out of Jane’s hands. “Please, Mom, I just can’t look at it anymore.”

By _it_ she meant finding a minister, picking flower arrangements, writing a speech. Funny how planning a wedding and a funeral were so alike.

“You won’t have to,” Xo whispered, running a hand through Jane’s tangled curls. The hesitancy, the fear in her voice was poorly disguised and Jane’s cheeks flushed with the irrational urge to ball her head into her mother’s shoulder with rage. Demand Xo to be stronger. Could she at least pretend that someone in the room had it together at that point? “We’ll handle all the planning and logistics. Your father, he’ll throw himself into it. I guarantee.”

Rogelio seemed to be just as distraught by the news as Jane was. Besides the occasional visit, he had more or less kept to himself the past few days and assumed temporary guardianship of Faith M. Whiskers while he was at it. That was fine by Jane. She could barely take care of herself and her son, much less a cat.

Alba smoothed out the creases in Jane’s sweatpants. They had remained unchanged after five days, carrying the remnants of microwave dinners and ugly sobbing. The house was in no better shape either. The universe was chaotic, but Jane always believed that a reasonable color scheme and the right lists could render it well-ordered. But it turned out she was wrong. And she hated that.

Almost as much as she hated the placidly quiet expression her grandmother was wearing. Alba was itching to say something, but unwilling to take the initiative for fear of impropriety. “Just spit it out, Abuela,” Jane hissed, more harshly than she intended. “I can see it on your face.”

“I was wondering,” Alba began, her voice dressed in a veneer of politeness, “if you would want to see Father Gilberto. For grief counselling.”

Jane’s mouth fell open, but she found that nothing came out. It was obvious that Abuela had been keeping this in, possibly since the very moment Jane broke down in tears at the medical examiner’s office. She had been waiting, calculating for when the most appropriate time to bring it up was. The knowledge of this burned at Jane’s gut. She was mad. It made no sense, but she was mad and she couldn’t help it and she knew this was how her grandmother cared for her and she knew that there was nothing wrong with the proposition. But she was mad and to her, that was okay because nothing made sense anymore, so why not?

“There’s nothing wrong with seeking outside help,” Alba was quick to add. “It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. People do it all the time. I just brought it up because … it helped me, when your grandfather—”

Abuela’s voice cracked and instead of finishing the sentence, she cupped her hand around Jane’s face and rocks her granddaughter. Xo readjusted her arm to hug her mother and her child tighter, an attempt to provide as much security as this world will let them.

In that moment, the thought tore away at Jane. A cruel taunt of a thought. At the end of the day, there will always be the three of them, hands intertwined, refusing to let go. How the Villanueva women have loved. Yet how they have lost.

Mateo’s cry rang forth from the nursery to signal the end of naptime. Jane’s hand gestured forward feebly, as if beckoning the rest of her to follow suit. Instead, her legs remain tucked into her chest, unwilling to budge.

Xiomara rose instead and strode over to the nursery. “Don’t worry, sweetie,” she cooed. “You won’t have to do this alone.”

“Thanks, Mom,” Jane muttered, trying to fight back a flood of angry tears. She couldn’t help the way her mind constantly constructed and deconstructed paragraphs of illogical babble. More than anything, she loved her family. _Loves_ her family. But no matter how much compassion and solidarity, these two women gave her, the truth was that half of her was gone. As far as Jane could tell, she was never not going to be alone.

And it was time for her to learn how to live with that.

 

* * *

 

 

It was fifteen days since she last edited the Word Document containing all 106,371 words of her thesis. Just because the first draft was done didn’t mean it was no longer a work in progress. Revisions were necessary. Every night, in between lapses of insomnia, Jane mentally ran through all the cringe-inducing dialogues and awkward turns of phrase that she could recollect. She would take anything— even the sourest fruit of her creative efforts— instead of the gnawing reminder that her husband was … not where he should have been, right by her side.

In a quiet show of humanity, Professor Donaldson inquired after her wellbeing before somewhat not subtly pressing her on the topic of her looming deadlines. Lately, Jane was reading all her emails at three in the morning, when the sleeplessness was at its worst, and replying to absolutely none of them.

The latest update in her inbox was a final list of arrangements from her father for the memorial in two days. He and Xiomara booked the church for an hour and a half, invited all the necessary friends, family, and coworkers, and the bouquets of choice would be snowdrop. Reception would follow at Alba and Xo’s house. Scrolling through Rogelio’s lavender-colored sans serif font, Jane almost wanted to laugh at the farce of it all. Michael had been real, breathing, human. He loved doing impressions of 90s cartoons and vigorously defending the Miami Heat and kissing his wife on the ear whenever she got stressed (which was a lot). All this life suddenly reduced to a ninety-minute slot in the parish schedule? It was a joke, that’s what it was.

“But hey,” Jane murmured to the silent night, to a bedroom that feels remarkably empty, even if there was one heart still beating inside it. “At least, you’re smiling.”

It was just late enough that Jane had run out of ways to numb her mind and resigned herself to finally clicking open on ThesisDraft2.docx. There was no way she could trust herself with undertaking any meaningful revisions. She wasn’t even sure if she could spell at the moment. Well, she probably could. But she didn’t want to take any chances.

But perhaps the words could whisk her away to a land where characters were rewarded for heroic deeds and happy endings existed. To a universe where the Higher Power writing the story was actually kind. She wouldn’t have minded staying in that good place for a while.

Instead, her eyes landed on the first sentence. The opening line to this saga that she poured the eight months of her life into. She had written and rearranged it a fifty-two times in the hope that it would be poetic, yet to the point; inspired, yet creative; somehow evocating the wit and wonder of other famous first lines, emulating the likes of Austen and Dickens and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. And every single one of those fifty-two potential openers she had run by the person she trusted most in the world. Looking at her final opener— the pinnacle of her writing process— all of its imperfect possibilities came rushing back at her. Along with his laugh, his perplexed bemusement, the knowing beam that lit up his face when she had finally read out the right first words.

Jane closed the laptop and went to sleep two hours later. 

 

* * *

 

 

“How are you feeling?”

Was this supposed to be grief counselling? Twenty-three hours before she had to get up on a pulpit and read out a speech she never dreamed she would ever have to write and make eye contact with in-law after in-law, all well-meaning, but all unable to process the gravity of her grief, and all this stupid— _control yourself, Jane_ , her mind warned— priest could think to ask was how she was feeling?

“How do you think I’m feeling?” She forced herself to swallow back some more of the vitriol. “My husband is dead.”

There it was. The words tacked like invisible bullets to the pregnant air. The truth and the weight of it.

“I can only imagine the pain. I’m not exactly a young man,” Father Gilberto made a self-referential gesture to his clumps of greyed hair. “I’ve lost many loved ones, some far too soon.”

“Then you know exactly how I feel.” Jane didn’t mean to come off so rude. But she had gotten four hours of sleep and Mateo had been particularly difficult all that morning and her father’s endless email updates had not improved her mood at all. Oh, and her husband was dead. That.

“Most likely,” Father Gilberto tapped his finger on his chin. “But I find that it’s best if we express the emotions ourselves. Using our own words can help us make sense of the incomprehensible. So Jane, how are you feeling?”

“I’m feeling…” she stuttered, frantically reaching for the right words and phrases, drifting around the recesses of her brain. But everything seemed to fade just as the thought came. Were there even words that could properly convey how deep the pit felt? Some unit of measurement?

There had to be. She was a writer. Well, her barely edited novel was holding that against her. Nonetheless, she was a reader. If her words couldn’t suffice, someone else’s could.

“It feels wrong.” She finally settled. “Wrong and just completely _fucked_ up and wrong and he wasn’t supposed to die. Not now, not at least for another sixty years, when we’re arguing on our front porch about what our cat’s name was. This wasn’t supposed to be the end of our love story.”

“Mhm.” Father Gilberto hummed. Jane looked up, expecting more. Some nugget of wisdom or even just a reprimand for her bad language. But his lips remained sealed and by that, she knew she had to continue.

“And I know, _I know_ there’s a difference between reality and fiction, but he always came back. He came back after my birthday and he brought me soup. He came back after everything happened with the insemination and Rafael. He came back after Mexico. He got shot and he came back. And every day, I wake up and I keep expecting him to do what he does best, what he always does, and just come back to me. But he won’t. He can't.”

“Jane,” Father Gilberto reached out and placed a soothing hand on Jane’s shoulder. “Your loss is very real and so painful. But God gives us reason to hope. You will see Michael again. And this time, it will be for eternity.”

He said it with such sincerity that all Jane could do was shake her head in fury. “No! No, don’t you think I prayed? Don’t you think, after I found out, I fell to my knees and pulled out my Bible and screamed for God to show me what all of this meant?”

“And what did He tell you?”

“He told me comfort and peace. Just threw out those words like they could solve everything.” Jane fished around her handbag, just longing for the familiar grip of her rosary. “But I read. I reread the entire Gospel of Matthew and I came across that verse where Jesus tells the people that there won’t be marriage in heaven. None of that because we will apparently be like angels and what is that supposed to mean and why is that supposed to be good enough?” She gasped and a sob escaped into the coldness of the room. “That’s not good enough. I wish it was, but it’s not.”

He passed her a box of tissues and Jane devoured into the Kleenex to no avail. Once an earthquake hits a dam, the water just comes spilling out and this had hit her with the force of a hundred earthquakes.

“It’s okay to have your doubts with God.” Father Gilberto reassured her in between the gross sounds of blown noses. “It’s _normal_. As long as you acknowledge those doubts and surrender them to God. Do you think you can do that?”

His words rang with all the familiarity of church bells. She heard this lesson before, beaten into instruction by nuns at Catholic school and the footnotes of every book on spirituality she had ever read. Even a month ago, when she broke down in front of the nun at the less than holy convent of stolen art, the template words for dealing with uncertainty were there. In the wake of Michael’s shooting, she thought she had learned her lesson with trusting God. But it took this sucker punch to show her that all that had still very much been dogma.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered and she’s not sure if it’s to God or Madonna or Father Gilberto or Michael. “I wish I could. I want to. But I don’t know if I can. At least not now.”

Father Gilberto tilted his chin upwards, his brown eyes surveying her with steely expectation. Jane wondered what it would have been like to see into the eyes of God. Would He have judged her right then and there? If anything, the best thing she could do was be honest.

“I don’t know if I ever can.”

**Author's Note:**

> Comment/kudos/find me on Tumblr at oldwestcolor.


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